Alternative Loss Functions to Classification Exercise
Bucketing is usually used in industry because we are not sure what we are going to get. Some amount of observation on the distribution will give you a good idea of bucketing. But, there is caveat, if there isn't a lot of variance then bucketing won't help much.
Also, in terms of losses, since different buckets will have different number of examples, class imbalance will arise. So, focal loss is the better loss here.
I hope you get results you can write home about.